All media were new at one point in their history. This thesis endeavoured to show the differences and similarities between the discourse on "new" media in the 19th and 21st century. The literature review showed that hopes and fears are among the topics that are frequently discussed, when new media are concerned. Therefore, this thesis tried to show, how these hopes and fears are discussed in the New York Times in these timeframes, and what discourse on regulation took place there. It was

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... to use an approach that was based on grounded theory as well as critical discourse analysis in order to shed some light on this topic. Subsequently, 104 articles of the New York Times were reviewed, coded and the data was formed into a theory. The research showed that "novelty" was the core category that emerged from the data. Novelty is understood to be the perception of whether a medium is fundamentally new and consists of two aspects: On the one hand, it is dependent on whether a medium is perceived to be able to do things the were impossible before and on the other hand, it depends on how long the medium had existed before it was reported on. The data suggested that this concept of novelty could explain a good deal of the variation found in the data. Among the most important relationships that it could explain were: The more novel a medium was perceived to be at the time of the article, the more (extreme) hopes and fears were attached to it. Furthermore the importance ascribed to a medium was usually higher, when the medium was perceived as a novelty. Novelty also had an impact on how often user value was discussed. If the medium was new, user value was more often and more explicitly discussed. Another important relationship that emerged from the data was between business, dispersion and actors. The most important feature of that relationship was that whether or not ordinary citizens featured in the debate was mainly dependent on whether or not they were users of the new medium and thus dependent on the dispersion of [...]